Laowai

• Claire got a cold. She stayed home from preschool on Wednesday. I feel like we haven’t had a regular week without a holiday or someone home sick in a long time. I guess I like a normal, regular schedule. 

• Claire is a trooper when she is sick. She’s here sleeping beside me in my bed. Stuffed up and breathing noisily. I let her sit around and play on the iPad all day. Our park district has a no screen week coming up and I think we should do it. I’ve let the screen time creep up and up during these cold winter days. Bad mommy.

• Bea also has a bit of a cold but she never wants to acknowledge it. I tell her it’s my job to find out how she’s feeling, but she just clams up. She’s afraid of being sick. Luckily she’s not too sick.

• Claire sleeps with me when Brian is gone – it’s a regular thing now. She doesn’t really like sleeping in her bedroom. Even on nights when Brian is here and she is relegated to her own bed she usually comes into our room around 3:00 and wakes me up. She has to go potty or she’s had a bad dream. Then I go sleep the rest of the night with her in her room. It’s comfy in there and I am too much of a weakling in the wee hours of the night to try to get her to go to sleep on her own. Oh well, she’s only going to be little for a little bit longer. And besides – I know how she feels – I like to sleep next to someone too.

• I was giddy with our finished bathroom last weekend. We installed the ceiling light. It was so great, it worked perfectly. But just one problem… it won’t turn off. Flip, flip, flip that switch and it stays on. So the light has stayed on until Brian is home later this week and we can hopefully figure it out. Never ending projects!

• Someone said they were “trying to make friends with the winter”. I liked that expression. It’s hard to make friends with the winter at the end of February. We got a few inches of snow last night and today and I didn’t relish the shoveling nearly as much as I do in December. 

• When Brian is traveling I can’t go to sleep. I usually don’t do anything useful – I watch TV or read blogs. Or I look at Etsy and obsess over objects that I really don’t need. Things like Crewelwork – I have a couple that were done by Brian’s grandmas and handed down to me. And I have my eye on one at my mom-in-law’s house (signed Donna).

More obsessions – I have a collection of these:

But now I am loving these too:

 

• Things, things, things. At the same time I’m feeling like sorting through things and getting rid of stuff. Throwing the windows open and cleaning stuff out sounds divine.

• And I’m dreaming of my garden. Just going out on a cold day to trim the old stems of hydrangeas and coneflower sounds so nice right now. We are going to take out the old overgrown junipers that run along the front of our house this spring. I can’t wait to get out there and start hacking away. Of course in the back of my mind I know that it is going to be a really hard job. 

• Alright – enough rambling. I’m going to try to go to sleep next to my little snuffleupagus here.